LOVING TO STRAIGHTEN OUT DEVELOPMENT: SEXUALITY AND ETHNODEVELOPMENT IN THE WORLD BANK'S ECUADORIAN LENDING |
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Authors: | Email author" target="_blank">KATE?BEDFORDEmail author |
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Institution: | (1) Mellon Post Doctoral Fellow, Department of Women's Studies, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA |
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Abstract: | Gender staff in the World Bank -- the world's largest and most influential development institution -- have a policy problem.
Having prioritised efforts to get women into paid employment as the ȁ8cure-allȁ9 for gender inequality they must deal with
the work that women already do -- the unpaid labour of caring, socialisation, and human needs fulfilment. This article explores
the most prominent policy solution enacted by the Bank to this tension between paid and unpaid work: the restructuring of
normative heterosexuality to encourage a two-partner model of love and labour wherein women work more and men care better.
Through a case study of Bank gender lending in Ecuador I argue that staff are trying to (re)forge normative arrangements of
intimacy, a policy preference that remains invisible unless sexuality is taken seriously as a category of analysis in development
studies. Specifically, I focus on four themes that emerge from the attempt to restructure heteronormativity in the loan: (1)
the definition of good gender analysis as requiring complementary sharing and dichotomous sex; (2) the Bank's attempt to inculcate
limited rationality in women such that they operate as better workers while retaining altruistic attachments to loved ones;
(3) the Bank's attempt to inculcate better loving in men, such that they pick up the slack of caring labour when their (partially)
rational wives move into productive work, and; (4) the invocation of a racialised hierarchy resting on the extent to which
communities approximate ideals of sharing monogamous partnership. Aside from providing clear evidence that the world's largest
development institution is involved in micro-processes of sexuality adjustment alongside macro-processes of economic restructuring,
I also critique the Bank's sexualised policy interventions and suggest that they warrant contestation. |
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Keywords: | Ecuador ethnodevelopment gender and development heteronormativity sexuality World Bank |
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